The Spaniards will be able to participate in the Eurovision final, although with changes in the televoting that supported Israel in 2025

Eurofans in Spain will be able to participate in the grand final of the 70th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest this Saturday, May 16, through televoting, although the system that gave the representative of Israel, Yuval Raphael, the highest in the 2025 edition has been subject to changes.

Despite the withdrawal of RTVE and four other public stations in protest of Israel’s war offensive on Gaza, Spaniards will be able to vote through the contest’s official website through a global system called ‘Rest of the World’, enabled for citizens of countries that are not part of the song festival.

Televoting is one of the most controversial issues in the contest in recent years. In 2025, the Spanish delegation asked to know how the Spanish vote had been distributed, that is, how many votes each country received in Spain. The Spanish televoting in the final of the contest was made up of 7,283 calls, 23,840 SMS and 111,565 online votes.

This translated into 12 points for the representative of Israel; 10 for Ukraine; 8 to Poland; 7 to Estonia, 6 to Finland; 5 to Sweden, 4 to Austria; 3 to Albania; 2 to Norway, and 1 to France, according to the figures published then by RTVE. Each person could cast up to 20 votes.

A recent investigation carried out by ‘The New York Times’ has revealed Spain’s popular vote in the grand final of Eurovision 2025. In this way, Israel obtained 33.34% of the total with 47,570 votes, well above Ukraine, with 6.74% and 9,620 votes, and Poland with 5.66% and 8,080 votes.

Researchers from the American media attribute this result to the fact that in 2025 the contest allowed each person to vote up to 20 times for their favorite artists and that the Israeli government carried out a campaign to try to influence the vote.

“CLAAMOR” FROM THE INTERNATIONAL PRESS

In relation to this investigation, the president of RTVE, José Pablo López, stated that the EBU cannot “ignore the clamor of the international press” and that the analyzes of media such as ‘The New York Times’ or the BBC on Israel’s participation “are not opinions of ‘who does not win'” as, in his opinion, the director of Eurovision, Martin Green, “insinuates.”

“These are serious warnings about a management that has lost its way. Reality shows that Eurovision urgently needs a new time at the height of the values ​​it has always defended. #Eurovision2026,” he stated in a comment in X, collected by Europa Press.

Following RTVE’s request in May 2025 to open a debate on televoting in the contest to assess whether the way it is done is the most appropriate, the director of Eurovision, Martin Green, told Europa Press that the voting process is “the most advanced in the world” and highlighted that “a large team of professionals verifies the results of each country to rule out any suspicious or irregular voting pattern.”

“An independent compliance monitor reviews the jury and public voting data to ensure the validity of the result,” he said, later adding that the Dutch firm Once.net “has confirmed that a valid vote was recorded in all participating countries in this year’s grand final and in the rest of the world.”

VOTING SYSTEM UPDATE

However, in November, the Eurovision Reference Group approved a series of updates to the voting system. Among the changes is the reduction from 20 to 10 of the maximum number of votes that each viewer can send from their devices during the galas. The EBU frames this decision in the desire to limit practices that may generate suspicions of manipulation and to encourage support to be distributed among more participants.

Another modification affects the role of the professional juries in the semifinals, in which they regain a weight of 50% in the result combined with televoting. The national juries will also expand their size from five to seven members per country and will incorporate young people between 18 and 25 years old.

The departure of the Festival implies that RTVE will not broadcast the contest that will be held in Vienna (Austria) either. However, followers of the format in Spain will be able to follow the final of the competition through the live broadcast that the organization itself offers on its official YouTube channel.

In Spain, the gala offered on TVE’s La 1 in 2025 registered 5,884,000 followers and a 50.1% share, which represented an increase of 9.2 points and close to a million viewers compared to the last edition. The votes achieved an average of 6.3 million viewers and a 59.7% share.